Facebook's Slingshot Changes Direction

Back in June, Facebook launched a new app called Slingshot. It was pretty silly, and was the subject of a great deal of ridicule. The whole concept of the app was that you and your friends could send picture messages to each other, but before you could even see what your friend sent, you had to send one yourself.

Yeah, it was dumb. I know the people who made it are almost certainly smarter than I am, but it was just a dumb app. It's not surprising that they eventually did away with that aspect of it, which was pretty much its main functionality in the first place.

Now, they've just started over entirely. The new Slingshot is about "sharing life as it happens".

"We understand that improving a product isn’t only about what you add, but about what you remove, so we made a simpler, cleaner, more fun Slingshot," the company says.

It lets you share fullscreen photos and looping videos, and includes five photo filters alongside drawings and captions.

"Every time you pull down the camera you’ll see a grid of the most recent content from the past day — shots only stick around for 24 hours or until they’re swiped away," the company explains. "We’ve also made it easier than ever to move between shots, reactions, people and the camera with our new swipeable tab design."

Users can filter, draw on and caption reactions, as well as preview reactions before sending.

If you're not asleep yet, you can check out the rest of what the new version does here.

Slingshot fell out of the top 1,000 apps in Apple's App Store in July.